When I made movies there was no televisionand consequently there were no talk shows. But if then I had been
told that some day actors would be paid large sums to sit and talk to one
another on television, and that an audience of millions would listen to
them – I wouldn’t have believed it. For the talk show is merely a
matter of transferringa
group of actors from a movie set where they sit and talk behindthe camera to a television set where they sit and talkbefore the camera. This form of entertainment took shape during the
production of the first movies when actors found themselves spending much
of their time on the set, unused, ignored or forgotten. And actors cannot
exist without an audience. When not working before the camera, they
contrived a means of staying alive by putting on a show of their own
behind it. Without a short time every actor had a repertory of
entertaining routines suitable for directors, producers and other actors.
Seen on a talk show, the actor’s is so obviously a mechanical
performance posing as spontaneous wit that its inanimate spirit cannot
engage the attention of a child for an instant. What holds adult attention
is the rare electrifying appearance of an actor who smashes his plaster
mask and brazenly expresses his natural animosity toward every other actor
present or absent, living or dead.

Coming from the theatre where
actors were not obliged to love or to pretend to love other actors, where
there were no popularity ratings backstage which might add to or subtract
from success, I faced my introduction to a movie set with an awful
question. Was this Cocktail party Spirit to prevail all day, every day for
a month maybe even for six weeks? Almost at once Frank Tuttle, the
director of The American Venus, dubbed me ‘babbling Brooks’ and
I knew I was doomed I had no funny stories no charming conversation,
nothing to make me babble. Double doomed! Because coupled with the
Cocktail Party Spirit was the Dog Act Spirit, a rapt devotion to the
master which most directors considered essential to their position of
command.

My first scenes were with Ford
Sterling who had been a Keystone comedy star until 1914 when his salary
demands led Mack Sennett to replace him with Charlie Chaplin. After years
of oblivion he was given a part in Malcolm St. Clair’s The trouble
with wives (1925) in which he made another comedy hit. Badly wanting
stars for feature comedies, Paramount was preparing Sterling for such
roles when The American Venus was filmed later in 1925 (he starred
in one film, The show off in 1926, and returned to oblivion). To
help feed Ford’s undernourished amour-propre, between scenes I was
expected to flirt with him and laugh very hard at his jokes. In this
capacity I was such a failure that he sulked and complained loudly about
my timing in the chase through the hotel suite. My timing in
yanking open and banging shut doors, he said, ruined his timing. To
appease him, time and money were wasted making extra shots of each scene.
Frank stopped calling me ‘babbling Brooks’ and I started disappearing
between scenes. When I was needed, the assistant director could find me
asleep on the nearest bedroom set.

As a movie set performer that
was still my depressed state when I went to Berlin in 1928 to film Pandora’s
box with G. W. Pabst. What an exquisite release, what a revelation of
the art of direction was the Pabst Spirit on the set! He actually
encouraged actor’s disposition to hate and back away from each other,
thus preserving their energy for the camera; and when actors were not in
use, his ego did not command them to sit up and bark at the sight of him.

The behaviour of the great
actor, Fritz Kortner, was a perfect example of how Pabst used an actor’s
true feelings to add depth and breadth and power to his performance.
Kortner hated me. After each scene with me he would pound off the set and
go there to coax him back for the next scene. In the role of Dr. Schön,
Kortner’s feelings for me (Lulu) combined sexual passion with an equally
passionate desire to destroy me. The theatre sequence gave him an
opportunity to shake me with such violence that he left ten black and blue
finger prints on my arms. Both he and Pabst were well pleased with that
scene. For Pabst’s feelings for me were not unlike those of Schön for
Lulu. In those two films, Pandora’s box and The diary of a
lost girl, I think he was conducting an investigation into his
relation to women with the object of conquering any passion that
interfered with his passion for his work. He was not aroused by sexual
love which he dismissed as an enervating myth. It was sexual hate which
engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality.

Mr. Pabst chose all my costumes
with care, but in scenes motivated by sexual hate he chose them as much
for their tactile, as for their sexual seductiveness. He wanted the actors
working with me to feel my flesh under a dancing costume, a blouse and
skirt, a night-gown. In turn, he wanted me to love the actor’s touch.
With adroit perversity he selected Gustav Diessl to play Jack the Ripper
in Pandora’s box, and Fritz Rasp to play the lascivious
chemist’s assistant in The diary of a lost girl. They were the
only actors in those films whom I found beautiful and sexually alluring.

There was no complexity in
Pabst’s direction on the Jack the Ripper scenes. He made them a tender
love passage until that terrible moment when Diessl saw the knife on the
edge of the table, gleaming in the candle light. But conceiving the
seduction scenes in The diary of a lost girl as a ballet with me
(Thymian) as the seductress, he directed them as a series of subtle almost
wordless manoeuvres between an ‘innocent’ young girl and a wary
lecher. He chose Fritz Rasp not only for the restraint with which he would
play a part verging on burlesque but also for a physical grace and
strenght. When I collapsed in his embrace he swept meup into his arms and carried me off to bed as lightly as if I
weighed no more than my silken nightgown and robe.